Book · Self-Published (Amazon Kindle) · 2018 · Fiction — Literary / Socio-Political
It started as an experiment.
I had been writing seriously for years — fiction, opinion, commentary — but I had never seen any of it through to a finished, published object in the world. I wanted to know what self-publishing felt like. Not the reception, not the sales, not the reviews — just the process of taking something from a blank page to a product that a stranger could hold. That was the original motivation, and if I am being honest with myself, it was the only honest one I had at the start.
But I don't put my name on anything cheap. So I sat with the question for a while: what do I actually care about right now, enough to spend serious time on it, enough to write something true? The killings kept coming back to me. The news cycles out of Northern Nigeria. The religious violence. The numbers that stopped feeling like numbers after a while. I was living in Warri at the time — in the South, far from the geography of it — and everything I knew came from screens and headlines. That distance was both a problem and, I eventually decided, part of the point.
"I needed something that could be rid of my biases, that would challenge my tolerance, and at the same time, help me tell a story that was not bound by a need to satisfy one faction or the other. Just present an extended plea for religious tolerance."
I have no personal relative I know of who has been a victim of inter-religious or inter-tribal violence. None. That made this one of the hardest things I have written, not technically, but emotionally. I had to learn to care the way someone with a personal story cares. I had to earn the right to write it.
The research took a full week. Documents, accounts, historical context, geographic specifics — all of it, hands-on. I was decidedly more Christian then than I am now, and I needed to write across that, to hold the lens as steadily as I could across all the violence, regardless of who was perpetrating it in any given story. The six stories are interconnected, with the links gradually revealing themselves as you move through the book. I had a rough sketch of the whole picture first, then took it one story at a time over the week of writing.
The whole thing — research to final draft — took about two weeks. It is not a long book. But it is, I think, a complete one.
I figured it out as I went. How to format a manuscript for Kindle. How to design a cover (the cover I produced is far from what I would do now — I can see every seam of my inexperience in it). What belongs in the copyright pages. How to write an acknowledgements section. How to price a book for a market you are not sure you can reach from Nigeria. Amazon Kindle's blog posts and help documentation were, genuinely, the most useful resources I had. Book sizing, print types, cover specifications — all of it, learned on the job.
Living in Nigeria added its own layer of friction. Finding the right platform to receive payments. Getting a Tax Identification Number to legitimize the account for payouts. By the time all of that was resolved, the natural window for marketing the book had narrowed. I eventually made peace with it: Minna, Saturday would be proof of concept. A signal to anyone who wanted to know whether I could build a sustained piece of fiction — that yes, I could.
I have since received one written review from an American reader who found the book on their own. It is positive, and it is on Goodreads. I have not gone back to check the sales numbers. That is a deliberate choice, for now.